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The Man who was Muddock

A brief biography of James Edward Preston Muddock
(28 May 1843 - 23 Jan 1934)

Muddock was in every way as colourful a character as his creations, which included not only Dick Donovan, the Glasgow Detective, but also Russian Secret Service agent Michael Danevitch, Vincent Trill of the Detective Service, private detective Tyler Tatlock and early forensic criminologist Fabian Field among others.

 Intriguingly, “Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock” was itself a pseudonym. Muddock was named at birth, much more prosaically, as “James Edward Preston Muddock”. On the birth certificates of his earlier children, he gives his name and designation as “James Edward Muddock, Author and Journalist” but adopts the names “Joyce” and "Emmerson" later on (for instance in the 1901 census).

Muddock was born in the New Forest near Southampton in 1843. His mother, Elizabeth Preston, was a Lancastrian, from the “proud Prestons of Preston” and his father, James Muddock, avoided the career planned for him in a family law firm by taking to the sea.

By his own account (in the rather self-aggrandising autobiography Pages from an Adventurous Life) Muddock tells us that:

• he had two older sisters, one of whom died at 20, and a younger sister

• his father lost all his savings in an ill-advised investment, which meant he had to stay on abroad to earn money and Muddock hardly ever saw him after he was 8

• the family house at Hant near Southampton had to be sold, after which they moved to Manchester.

1854 - 1864 - India, Australia, China and cannibals

Muddock went to India to join his father when he was barely 14, where he worked for the Railway Engineering Department, saw the Indian Mutiny, joined the East India Company’s gun foundry at Cossipore (where he was involved in the manufacture and delivery of the notorious Dum Dum bullets). Returning to England in 1859, he heard news of his father’s death in 1861, which ruled out a return to India.

 At school he had discovered a talent for writing and had put together a magazines and contributed reviews to journals of the day. But in 1861 he heard Charles Dickens read from The Chimes at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall and turned “decidedly towards literature”.

An uncle by marriage was a journalist and printer in Melbourne, Australia and Muddock secured passage there by engaging as private secretary to a government agent in charge of a ship load of emigrants. A trek to a goldmine gave him a taste for the Bush, and as there was friction between Muddock and the uncle, they parted ways. 

A spell gold mining, the theft of his profits (£150) and an illness led to his taking a position on a ship for China, and he spent some months in Shanghai. For some reason he decided to join the rebels at Amoy, who were defeated by “Chinese” Gordon, who broke the Taiping Rebellion in May, 1864 (and later died in the defence of Khartoum against the Mahdi, January 26, 1885). Muddock says this period gave him the material for his later book The Golden Idol (Chatto & Windus 1899).

Further adventures around New Guinea and the Solomons, including dinner with cannibals, culminated in a return to “that awful hole” Shanghai, trips to Hong Kong and Singapore and then passage back to England.

1864 - 1870 - America and Australia again

Muddock's eldest sister had by then married a wealthy cotton baron in Lancashire, and Muddock was engaged by him to visit America and find blockade-runners to help get cotton out (this was the height of the Civil War). The mission failed and, back in Manchester, Muddock made the acquaintance of various thespians, including Henry Irving And Charles Calvert.

After another trip to America in 1867 and a short sojourn back in Manchester, Muddock went to stay with relatives in London, some of whom had newspaper connections. By 1868 the ever-restless Muddock was back in Melbourne, where he almost talked a cousin into walking across Australia with him, but then returned to London. Muddock never saw Australia again, but his last published book (as Dick Donovan) was Out There: A Romance of Australia (1922).

Muddock bought a weekly newspaper and also started a monthly magazine called The Coronet. This folded thanks to a copyright action brought by Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of shorthand, because Muddock was running a popular series of articles on Pitman’s system and Pitman felt he had the rights to the character diagrams.

1870 - 1879 - Journalism and the first Serials

Around this time Muddock came up with the idea – he says he discussed it with Wilkie Collins – of providing the many small, local newspapers around the country with stirring tales to read, on a syndication basis. Taking advantage of excitement of the supposed capture of Nana Sahib, instigator of the Cawnpore Massacre, Muddock dashed off The Great White Hand and offered it around. This not only made him £1,500 (equivalent to 100 times that in 2004) it also led to invitations to write more fiction. Muddock contracted with Tillotson's Newspaper Fiction Bureau of Bolton and, when the contract expired, had enough willing clients to take his works. Among these were Charles Alexander, then proprietor of the Dundee Weekly News and the Daily Courier, newspapers which would assume greater importance later in Muddock’s life.

From 1870 to 1874 Muddock continued editing his paper and writing short fiction, but also wrote his first two books for Samuel and William Tinsley - A False heart (1873), which was a failure, and presumably the more successful Wingless angel (1875).

After his own publication stopped, Muddock worked for James Henderson’s stable, sub-editing The Mirror (a high-class but short-lived weekly) and contributing to the incredibly successful boys’ paper, The Weekly Budget (then selling 500,000 copies a week) and The Young Folk’s Budget. He also looked after the despatch office. When Henderson cancelled The Mirror, Muddock took a post with of a new, ultra-Protestant Conservative-leaning paper The Hour, and co-edited The London Scottish Journal.

The Hour sent Muddock abroad a great deal (his earlier experiences made him a natural as their “special Asia/Pacific correspondent”) until it crashed in 1876 amid low readership figures and a financial scandal and despite its success in some quarters (Disraeli said he “heard with a pang that The Hour was no more”) and he took to the freelance life, visiting France, Portugal and elsewhere. On his return he edited another Boys’ paper but was enticed to Scotland to help revitalise the moribund Greenock Advertiser.

Living in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, Muddock continued to produce serialisations, short fiction and other works, as well continuing his regular “Rothesay Recluse” columns for the Advertiser. In 1879, however, he inherited a small but welcome inheritance from his father’s brother, Henry Gregson Muddock, who had been so infuriated by his nephew’s conduct when staying with him in Southampton prior to his leaving for India 22 years previously, that he had disinherited him. Fortunately, when the old uncle went down (with 900 other souls) on the pleasure steamer Princess Alice after a collision on the Thames, he was intestate, and Muddock inherited after all.

1879 - 1887 - Switzerland, France, Switzerland again, marriage and children

This allowed Muddock the time and finances to again tour the Continent, including Alsace, Germany and Russia. After a brief return home in 1879 to receive his legacy, Muddock headed off again, this time to Davos Platz, Switzerland.

This marked a turning point in Muddock’s career as a writer. Without dwelling on the circumstances, he decided to take on the growing resort as a project and published a phenomenally successful guide book to the area, as well as a more general guide to Switzerland. He also persuaded Phillip Holland, a noted analytical chemist, to visit and test the air, water and local milk – which all of which Muddock found fault – and criticised the draining, food, transport and practically every other aspect of the place. By Muddock’s account, this was instrumental in persuading the villagers to develop the place properly as a sanatorium resort.

Muddock then headed for Villefranche in the south of France (pausing to get married in Paris in 1880, but more of that later) to write up his Swiss notes. He lived there for over two years and had his first daughter, Ruth Francis (sic) in 1881. He might have stayed, except for his neighbour, the Russian Prince d’Oldenburg, requesting that Muddock vacate his villa in order to accommodate two guests who had been badly injured in a carriage accident. Apparently, the Prince couldn’t have them recuperate in his chateau over the Russian Christmas, which was expected to be boisterous, so he bought out Muddock, who then headed for Geneva, “in the interests of my guide-books”.

He must have lived in Geneva at least a few years as he had three further children – twin girls Violet Preston and Rose Victorine in 1885 and a son Edward Preston in 1887 (although a second daughter, Dorothy Vernon, had been born in England in 1883). Muddock served as Swiss correspondent for The Daily News for six years until 1887.

It was also during this period that two books appeared in France which vilified England and the English (by Hector France and Jules Valles) , and Max O’Rell (also a Frenchman) produced an English translation of his humorous diatribe John Bull and His Island. Muddock took it upon himself to strike back in kind, and the result was John Bull’s Neighbour in her True Light by “a Brutal Saxon” published anonymously in 1884 with Muddock ordering a print run of 25,000 copies from Wyman and Sons, printers of his guide-books. Edward Wyman talked him down to 10,000 copies, and in fact only printed 5,000, completely underestimating the demand. Muddock, then visiting London to oversee the launch, discovered this on a Sunday morning and insisted that Wyman fulfil his end of the bargain. In the event, within three weeks over 48,000 had been printed and distributed and the translation rights were sold almost everywhere, especially as it “tickled the Germans immensely”. A French author who had bought the rights and printed it had his entire stock confiscated by a furious government.

Muddock’s signature, taken from the birth certificate of his twin sons, Horace Lionel Preston and Jasper Milton Preston (??May 25^th 1888, St Andrew Parish, Dundee)

More on the Muddock family

1887 - 1891 - the Dundee years

Muddock’s time abroad was curtailed by bad health (he blamed the bad drainage around his house in Geneva) and he took a house in Deal, Kent. However, Charles Alexander had died and the ownership of the Dundee Weekly News and the Daily Courier had been acquired by on W. Thomson, a ship-owner of Dundee. He and one of his sons set up W & D C Thomson and, as Muddock was well known to them as a contributor they enticed him to the city of jute, jam and journalism. Muddock signed on for three years and arrived in 1887 – in time for his twin sons Jasper Milton and Horace Lionel to be born the next year.

It was while in the Thomsons’ employ that Muddock wrote a serialised account of the life of Richard Piggot (who had forged letters which led to the conviction of Charles Parnell, the Irish patriot. The 17 Weekly News pieces were later collected as The Crime of the Century and published by John Long in 1904.

But he had also started writing the Dick Donovan stories, and thereafter Muddock was better known by this name than by his own.

After four years, Muddock wearied of Dundee and headed for Canada. Muddock says almost nothing about this period in his autobiography, except that he had “a delightful time, particularly in the Rockies”. What a wife and seven young children thought of it, if indeed they went with him, is not old. His eighth child, Eleanor, was born at Shortlands, Kent in 1893, so he must have spent less than two years away.

Dick Donovan, as pictured by Paul Hardy in Strand

1891 - 1907 - The Strand, Dick Donovan and beyond

Muddock took up lecturing professionally, but then met Galloway Fraser, a journalist he had known in Scotland and now in London as editor of the popular weekly news digest Tit Bits, started in 1881 by George Newnes, a former vegetarian restaurant owner. Fraser introduced Muddock to Newnes, who asked for a topical piece and was offered a story on the persecution of the Jews in Russia. Asked for a title, Muddock proposed For God and the Czar and was persuaded to churn it out in two weeks flat. Muddock claims it “sent the publication  of the paper up like a rocket”, and certainly when it was published in book form under the same title in 1895 it was a worldwide best-seller, particularly amongst Jewish readers, but (unsurprisingly) was banned in Russia.

Muddock also wrote The Life of Vidocq for Newnes (published in book form by Hutchinson as Eugene Vidocq: Soldier, Thief, Spy, Detective in 1895, but authored by “Dick Donovan”), and started his run of Donovan stories in the other magazine from the same stable, Strand. These were used by the editor Herbert G Smith (see below) as fill-ins for Conan Doyle after the first series of Holmes stories had appeared in 1891-92. They were:

• The Jewelled Skull (in July 1892, just after the end of Conan Doyle's first series of Sherlock Holmes stories); .

• The Story of the Great Cat's Eye (August 1892);

• The Secret of the Black Brotherhood (September 1892);

• The Chamber of Shadows (November 1892 - the October issue detective story was Grant Allen's The Great Ruby Robbery).

But Dick Donovan was already a popular detective character, whose escapades had appeared in various publications before the first fifteen were collected in the definitive Chatto & Windus editions The Man-Hunter: Stories from the Note-Book of a Detective (1888).

This is dwelt on elsewhere, but it is clear that Dick Donovan as a character pre-dated Sherlock Holmes in popularity and was as well recognised a name as Conan Doyle’s in the early days. The first ever Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet had appeared in Beeton's 1887 Christmas Annual; and Dick Donovan stories were written and published well before that.

The rest of Muddock’s life was dominated by Donovan. Though he affected to be less captivated by his detective than by his “proper” writing, he responded to the rustle of the cheque book. He wrote non-Donovan books using that pen-name, recognising its greater commercial worth than his own, and his tales of Michael Danevitch of the Russian Secret Service (collected in 1897) led to some suspicion that Donovan (or perhaps even Muddock!) was, in fact, in the pay of Russia.

However, as “J E P Muddock” he still made forays into print with history and historical fiction.

1907 - 1934 - Autobiography and surprising omissions

What is most remarkable in Muddock’s own telling of his life story, Pages From an Adventurous Life. With thirty one illustrations by "Dick Donovan" (J E Preston Muddock) (T Werner Laurie 1907) is that he manages to summarise his entire life up to the age of 65 without once mentioning:

• his wife or eight children (including three sets of twins), whom he must have either trailed all over the world with him or left while he travelled

• his marriage in Paris on June 5th 1880 to that wife, Eleanor Rudd, a native of Brough, Westmoreland born around 1851

• the significant fact that his second daughter, Dorothy, married Herbert Greenhough Smith, Editor of the Strand and fully 26 years her senior

On the other hand, he devotes about a fifth of the book to his bohemian cronies in the Savage Club.

 There is also a record of a marriage between a James Edward Muddock and Lucy Mary Hann on 22 January 1872 in London (when Muddock was certainly there, editing his newspaper). There is evidence from his own writing of more than one wife (see here).

The last years

Muddock’s output dwindled after 1907 (as befits a man who has reached 65) but during the First World War he joined the police as a Special Constable, as did another detective writer of the time, Arthur Morrison, as well as many men who were too old for military service overseas but wished to serve their country. Muddock would have been over 70. Was it his interest in crime fiction which prompted that choice? Interestingly, Muddock stopped writing detective fiction about the same time. Perhaps the reality was at odds with the romance. Perhaps it was the death of his three sons, two of them in the war. But ever keen to turn an experience into a profit, in 1920 Muddock published a book about the work of the Special Constables, All Clear, as "J E Preston Muddock (Dick Donovan)"; clearly he or his publisher recognised the continuing value of using the detective alias to popularise it.

His last published work was Out There: A Romance of Australia (1922) produced when he was nearly 80 years old.

Muddock lived out the end of his life poor, mostly isolated from Eleanor and his family. At the communal house bought by his daughters in Wandsworth, he was mainly confined to his study and took his meals there. In 1931 he was moved in with an unmarried daughter, Rose, and died on 23 January 1934 at her small flat at 5 Crockerton Road, Upper Tooting, London. He left estate and effects worth a total of £74, a figure more like £3.500 today (2004), and by no means a fortune. The implication is that, while his books were bestsellers and he made a considerable amount of money, he died, if not in poverty, at least not rich. His books were mostly out of print and he was all but forgotten as an author. However, there was small posthumous fame of a sort in reprints of his "true crime" stories in the Mellifont Celebrated Crimes Series of 1936

More on the Muddock family here
 

A lasting legacy

Like Conan Doyle, Muddock wanted to be remembered chiefly for his historical fiction, but it is his detective creation which has lasted in the popular memory. Dick Donovan was very much of his time, and that time has passed. But the vast canon of Muddock’s work influenced detective and mystery fiction more than almost any other writer of his day.

His greatest legacy is that the name of his signal creation had entered into common parlance – ever since 1908 Americans have referred to a police detective as a “Dick”.

Anyone interested in Muddock family history and genealogy should consult Shaun Muddock's site http://www.muddock.com or
Bev Rowe's site http://www.bevrowe.info/FH/FH_Muddock.htm